


I Got A Few Miles To Go Before I Concede

by ancestrallizard



Series: Picture a young boy in pieces [2]
Category: Shin Megami Tensei Series, 真女神転生IV FINAL | Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Manipulation, Violence, nothing overt but implied violence and death, spoilers for about midway through the game, story uses my nanashi who is named Kite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-11-07
Packaged: 2018-08-29 13:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8491717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancestrallizard/pseuds/ancestrallizard
Summary: Dagda finds a way to motivate Kite at one of his lowest moments (Kite wishes he hadn't).





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a lyric in the Doomtree song "The Bends". It's a good song, check it out.

The road to Ginza was proving to be more difficult than Dagda thought it would be.

 

_Demons are going to jump out of the alley coming up, get ready._

 

Kite didn’t respond, and Dagda hadn’t really expected him to at this point. He took control and put the kid in a fighting stance. The rest of their group followed suit, and the demons attacked not a second later.

 

The other humans stayed together to fight two of them, which left Kite to face the last demon, a hissing Ouroboros, alone. 

 

_On your left! Wake up, kid!_

 

He was as silent and unresponsive as the corpse he came from. Dagda twisted his body to the side himself, but he was too slow. The demon flew past him, and its whiptail sheared Kite’s arm and left a sluggishly bleeding gash. The metal serpent came around again, and again Dagda was too slow pulling his body out of the way. This time there was a flash of silver and a sharp snap like breaking sticks, and the demon slithered away through the air, its maw clamped shut on four of the fingers from Kite’s right hand.

 

Hell with it. Dagda summoned Throne as the serpent started to eat its ill-gotten meal. One Mahamaon later, both the demon and its grisly food where annihilated in a blaze of light. 

 

Dagda dismissed the angel, but it lingered, looking at Kite with a worried furrow in its brow and an expression Dagda would call concern, if it wasn’t on the face of an angel. It opened its mouth, but didn’t say anything, and returned to the smartphone. If even his demons were pretending to feel sorry for him, the kid was even more pathetic than he thought.

 

The cut on his arm had closed already, but his fingers were still stumps. They were complicated, and it would take a while for the bone, nerves, and tendons to weave back together into working order. 

 

The others had finished up their fight as well, and were healing. They kept giving sideways glances to Kite, and to his missing fingers, but none approached. The kid might have been hurt by his so-called-friends not talking to him, if he were paying any attention. 

 

Of all the things Dagda had expected when he created a Godslayer, tedium had not been one of them. And it hadn’t been boring, at least at first. Kite realized soon after their bargain that he was essentially trapped in his own mind, and he’d repeatedly fought and struggled against Dagda to regain any modicum of control. He never could, and Dagda taunted him for thinking he ever stood a chance. The kid would never be able to get rid of him, but his resistance kept things interesting. 

 

When screaming and fighting and cursing him failed, the kid slipped into acceptance at his possession. Which was boring, but an acceptable trade-off for their increased proficiency in battle, now that the kid wasn’t constantly trying to defy him and they could cooperate.

 

But then Kinshicho had been attacked. The grief that tore through the kid at the sight of his father’s body was so overwhelming that Dagda almost felt it. Immediately after his sister left, he just – stopped. He curled up in a distant corner of his mind and wouldn’t say or do anything, no matter what Dagda told him. 

 

Which left Dagda as the sole pilot. He’d always had the majority of control, but there were reactions in a fight, like reflexes and muscle memory, that were difficult for a foreign body to direct. The kid could recover from any damage, but waiting for the body to repair itself slowed them down. And even gods had a limit on how much they were willing to put up with. 

 

The group started to move again, and Dagda made the body follow. He idly watched through Kite’s eyes as the Ashura-kai lackey spoke with his mother’s puppet. The lackey was weak, but he could see potential in him. Maybe he’d put up more of a fight than Kite if he were a Godslayer instead. 

 

Something prickled at the edge of their connection. Kite’s consciousness was unfurling, and he was afraid in a way he hadn’t been since he was first resurrected. But why?

 

He scoured Kite’s mind for answers. The kid didn’t even try to keep him out of his memories like he had before, not that it had ever worked. His fear was tethered to Dagda’s own fleeting comment about the lackey (A reminder to Dagda to be more vigilant. The connection between he and Kite was mostly one-way. He could read everything in Kite’s mind, but Kite couldn’t see anything in his unless he let him, or he forgot to keep the barrier up between them). The thought of the lackey dredged up the image of his father’s lifeless staring eyes and bloodstained face. That memory had connections to the memory of two shattered, burned corpses, and to things even deeper down that he didn’t consciously know about. Fragments of memories of a voice that sang to him and said his name, a presence that held and protected him, but disappeared and left a cold absence in its wake. 

 

So that was it. Dagda couldn’t make another Godslayer whenever he wanted, it wasn’t that simple. But Kite didn’t know that. 

 

_Yeah, at this point even he’d be a better fighter than you, kid. It might be more worth my time if I use him instead._ He projected the image of the Ashura-kai spy as a Godslayer into Kite’s mind. He gave the specter grey corpse skin, the awkward gait of the newly possessed, and the same dead eyes as the kid’s father. 

 

Kite’s consciousness was more awake now, and Dagda could almost taste the fear it gave off. He’d notice the kid’s growing attachment to the lackey, how his gaze turned to follow him whenever Dagda wasn’t completely controlling him. And that knowledge was paying off. Kite’s own imagination spun the image and made it even more gruesome. Under the fear, sparks of resentment were rekindling.

 

He forced the kid to look at the spy in particular, which sent another wave of dread through him. _Of course, he might not work out either. Sometimes, the magic fails, and they never come back to life._

 

The kid’s anger was building, outpacing the fear. Good. Dagda made him look at the group as a whole. He spoke in a voice so soft he may as well have been Kite’s own thoughts. _In that case, I’d just have to keep going until I got it right._

 

The kid was starting to fight him again. His body vainly tried to heed its original master, to move, or at least speak. _If you can’t do it, I’ll find someone else. You’ll watch me try the Templar, and the masked girl, and I’ll even take my mother’s puppet when her back is turned. As many as I have to to make a real Godslayer._

 

Kite’s hatred was an inferno. He was soundlessly screaming at him in his helplessness, trying to reject the images Dagda was showing him. He felt the kid thrash against their connection to break away and give voice to his rage. But Dagda was an old hand at controlling him by this point, and the kid couldn’t make so much as a twitch. 

 

He sent new images before he spoke again, and the kid’s fury went out immediately as if doused by the ocean. He tried to push them away, but Dagda held him in place and made him see. He almost couldn’t interpret the building maelstrom of emotion in the kid. He could pick out shock, and denial, and recognition of his deepest fear being realized. Dagda filled the sudden silence with one last reminder of what was at stake.

 

_And if they don’t work out, then maybe your sister –_

 

He didn’t get to finish his sentence. Cold fury hit Dagda with a rush of power and focus he hadn’t thought the kid was capable of. If he’d been prepared it wouldn’t have done anything, but it was like an old, thoroughly broken dog suddenly fighting back with the ferocity of a wolf. A shock of disorienting numbness spread through him as strings of the connection snapped and he was forcefully thrown from Kite’s mind. 

 

Kite’s face contorted in rage, and his newly healed fingers flexed and went for the hilt of his sword, even though there was no logical way he could hurt Dagda with it.  
But he hadn’t been in complete control of his body for some time, and before he could say or do anything, he tripped on legs now foreign to him and fell hard onto the asphalt. 

 

“Leader!”

 

Dagda dived back in while the kid was stunned, shoving Kite’s mind away and taking full control.

 

The Ashura-kai spy had run back to check on him. “Are you okay?” The others had stopped too, and were looking at him with varying levels of concern.

 

Dagda nodded the kid’s head that yes, he was fine, and clamped his mouth shut so tightly that the bones of his jaw groaned under the strain. He got up and kept going as if nothing had happened. 

 

Kite was more cooperative after that, and pulled his weight in fights again. His hatred of Dagda was ever present, but it didn’t surface. He won more and more battles virtually scathed, and Dagda had a proper Godslayer again. 

 

He told the kid as much just outside Ginza, as they stood over the shredded corpse of a demon. Kite hadn’t even needed to summon anything to help kill it this time. Its blood was cooling on his hands and under his nails. _See, kid? Do what I say, and this will work out for both of us._

 

_I’m going to kill you._

 

The thought carried none of Kite’s anger from before. It was a neutral statement of fact, as if he were describing the weather. Dagda didn’t dignify it with a response, and told him to get ready for their next opponent. Kite obeyed.

 

(Dagda kept tighter control over the body than he did before, constantly vigilant of another attempt to take back control. He kept the barrier between them stronger as well. Kite could sense nothing from him, not in the least a building feeling that wouldn’t leave Dagda alone, that took the shape of the wall of fury that dislodged him before. It bore more than a passing resemblance to something anyone else would call fear.)

**Author's Note:**

> Danu absolutely saw her punk son get spiritually thrown on his ass. She eternally regrets afterward that no camera exists that could have recorded it.
> 
>  
> 
> I don't talk about smt much there anymore, but feel free to check out my tumblr anyway; ancestrallizard.tumblr.com/


End file.
